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CALL FOR CHAPTERS

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GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

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Edited by Alex Adams

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The kaiju genre has never been so healthy. Godzilla, now an Oscar-winner thanks to the world-leading VFX of Godzilla Minus One (2023), stars in two global movie franchises at once, with the Legendary MonsterVerse expanding into TV, print media, and video games whilst a freshly announced ‘Godzilla Universe’ promises to deliver a comparable slate of output from Japanese originators Toho. Gamera, Ultraman, and Evangelion too, have been rejuvenated in recent years; giant monsters have made prominent appearances in both the MCU (Galactus in Fantastic Four: First Steps [2025]) and DCU (Kaiju in Superman [2025]); Chinese cinema has given us Abyssal Spider (2020) and The Monster is Coming (2024), South Korean The Host (2006). Broadening its territory from the conventional US-Japan B-movie axis, the giant monster movie has entered a new golden age, but we scholars are yet to catch up.

 

While Godzilla’s symbolic associations with nuclear weapons, Japanese historical trauma, and Cold War tensions are well-known, scholarship has yet to fully reckon with the multifaceted implications of the contemporary re-emergence of giant monsters as major cultural figures. How, for example, can we reconcile Godzilla’s progressive antinuclear political credentials with Adorno’s claim, in Minima Moralia (1951), that the fascination with giant monsters is a sublimated form of fascination with sovereign power – or indeed, how do we reckon with Shinzo Abe’s attempts to appropriate Shin Godzilla as an icon of his right-wing neoliberal government? How do we read the MonsterVerse’s conception of violently enforced natural hierarchy in a time of global fascist solidarities? There was much twentieth century talk of Cold War monstrosity, but are we yet able to talk of a post-9/11 kaiju? Kaiju stories have offered powerfully liberatory narratives and images to queer and neurodivergent people, but in the west at least they remain marked by the whiteness that characterizes so much mainstream science fiction; (how) is this complicated by the genre’s Japanese origins? To what extent is critical discourse on the kaiju genre marked by an implicit embarrassment about ‘unserious’ cultural production?

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Explicitly connecting contemporary giant monsters to the twenty-first century political and social histories from which they emerge, this edited collection will critically explore the kaiju as an international cultural figure, analysing its capacious symbolic potentials and its ambiguous political promise. Essays on any kaiju text are welcome as long as they refer clearly to twenty-first century political and/or critical contexts. A range of formats and methods are welcomed: conventional academic analysis, experimental/creative methods, personal/autoethnographic essays, and more. Contributions from minoritized writers are actively encouraged.

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Customary very long yet necessarily incomplete list of suggested topics:

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  • Power, violence, justice

  • Neoliberalism and political spectacle

  • Antifascism & anticapitalism

  • Contemporary warfare

  • Climate disaster, the Anthropocene, eco-politics, eco-fascism

  • Monster Theory, animality, the more-than-human

  • Nostalgia: genre prehistory, historical revision, rebooting

  • The future: time travel, the end of the world, hope

  • Race, racialisation, racism: simianisation, noble savages, slavery, biological determinism, white supremacy, whiteness, techno-orientalism, afrofuturism

  • Kaiju & imperialism: alien civilisations, invasion, self-defence, emergency ethics

  • Utopia: internationalism, geopolitics, perfected societies, class, the city

  • Sex, gender: reproduction, transformation, parenthood, family

  • The body and difference: neurodiversity, disability, embodiment

  • Disreputable epistemologies and ontologies: occultism, conspiracism, para-archaeology, ufology, post-truth, etc.

  • Mythology, classics, folklore

  • Oceans, marine life, the planetary

  • Religion, eschatology, apocalypse

  • Robots, Mechas, AI, transhumanism, technology

  • Genre fluidity: the relation of kaiju movies to science fiction, comedy, horror (particularly J-horror), children’s media, fantasy, wrestling, dance, sports, comedy

  • Parody, mockbusters, badfilm

  • Form crossover: kaiju in video games, comics, literature

  • Franchise-building, intertextuality, sequelization

  • Material culture: collecting, toys, physical media, advertising

  • Audience reception & fan cultures: podcasts, social media, fan scholarship, conventions

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300-word abstracts and short bios should be sent to c21kaijucollection@gmail.com by 31st October 2026. Queries and questions are welcome. Completed chapters will be in the 7500/8000-word range, although depending on the nature of the submission other lengths will be considered. Anything composed using any form of AI will not be considered.

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